Fishing around: Stop wishing, go fishing

Wednesday

Mar 26, 2014 at 11:30 PMMar 26, 2014 at 11:45 PM

Welcome to endless winter.

Rob Conery

Welcome to endless winter.

Plenty of fishing activity already! My source, Fairbanks Wolf Track, reports good number of Arctic char along with many penguins and some snow walrus mixed in. There are seals on the ice floes, but watch for polar bears.

What did we expect in this year of the snowy owl? Palm trees and boat drinks?

It's been a busy season on our frozen sandbar.

The lucky headed south to fish for tarpon, grouper and sailfish. Many others stayed local, but hit up the boat shows and the tackle shows.

Still others went down to Fishing The Cape in Harwich where on Tuesday nights they run a fly-tying club with guest tiers. The Osterville Anglers Club hosted a speaker series at its supreme clubhouse on Crosby Basin.

Anything to keep the stoke going until we can get back to wetting lines locally.

A grant from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation funded the removal of a tremendous pile of "ghost gear" that litters the area. The idea was to use sonar to spot and then remove lost and abandoned fishing gear that entangles sea life.

The crews were able to remove hundreds of lost lobster traps, as well as piles of line and netting, engine blocks, marine batteries and even an old toilet bowl from the sea floor.

Piping plovers closed the outer beach last year for a record 83 consecutive days. But a new proposal by the town of Orleans seeks federal approval to mitigate these closures.

By adding staff — a beach patrol officer and six plover monitors — they hope to keep the beach open more often, an action that surely will be applauded by many locals who fork over the not-insignificant fees for off-road permits. The appeal awaits federal approval.

The state Division of Marine Fisheries has announced big changes in the commercial striped bass fishery. In a nutshell, commercial landing limits have gone from 95 fish per week to 30, and from four days to two. Understandably, not all commercial guys are happy with this.

Darren Saletta is president of the Massachusetts Commercial Striped Bass Association.

Reasons for the changes are many, a combination of what Saletta calls the "anti-commercial interests" — meaning groups like Stripers Forever and others who seek gamefish status for striped bass — in addition to a market glut in recent years resulting from a short season and a surge of fishing boats hitting a small area off Chatham, which Saletta called a "circus."

Saletta's group has about 130 members. That's among 4,000 commercial permits issued every year by the state. The numbers can be misleading. Of them, only about 1,200 sell even a single fish in any given year. Of those 1,200, fewer than 300 land more than a thousand pounds a year.

"This (new regulation) hurts the big producers," says Bruce Peters, a longtime commercial bass fisherman who also runs Capeshore Charters. "They've degraded the fishery. All this does is hurt the most successful fishermen."

Peters sees striped bass as a resource belonging to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and commercial fishermen as a tool to harvest that resource for the people, people who may not have boats or go surfcasting, but still want to enjoy striper at home or in restaurants.

No one really makes a living in the striper fishery. It's part of a whole. Dan Howes of Orleans is an exemplar of the breed. He fishes commercially for bass, but less and less now, focusing more on dogfish, his oyster grant and commercial shellfishing. Like many fishermen — indeed, many Cape Codders — he stitches together his annual income from several sources.

The overall quota for commercial bass remains unchanged at 1.1 million pounds this year, (comparatively, the recreational harvest is estimated at 6 million pounds), but with a longer season and less days per week.

In recent years, the commercial quota has been reached in as little as 14 days. It was open 16 days last year. This creates a market glut that forces down prices. Last year prices opened about $4.75 per pound, but quickly fell to around $2 with a low of $1.90.

"In 1995, we were getting between $2.75 and $3.25," says Peters.

As part of the new regulations, the season will open June 23. It traditionally opened July 12 to make room for the earlier commercial seasons in New York and Rhode Island, who see migratory fish sooner.

Fisherman are hoping to have a more steady price in the $4 per pound range stretched over a longer period of time. While it will hurt the "big bangers" who can catch 30 fish a day (the old daily limit) with relative ease, the idea is to lengthen the season.

A further bone of contention is the proposed elimination of a charter captain's ability to sell stripers.

Charter guys can offset their fuel costs will a few fish sold here or there — they are still limited to two per paying customer, mirroring recreational limits — and are not huge contributors to the quota.

Many fear that with the elimination of the charter sales, you'll have a situation where a guy from New York (or Oklahoma, etc.) can come here and sell the bass he catches, but a guy who lives and works on Cape Cod yearround can't.

The charter question remains unresolved until at least the next meeting of the DMF.

Well, that's that. One down and many more to come.

I'll be here every Thursday, talking about fish until the fall run. Good to be back.

Welcome to spring on Cape Cod. Now, grab a snow shovel!

Contributing writer Rob Conery can be contacted at robconery@yahoo.com.

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